Hollywood: Killing Originality Daily

This was originally going to be a piece about how wrong it was for Will Smith to remake The Wild Bunch. But that metastasized into an idea about remakes and reboots in general.

So I wound up simply writing an open letter to Smith about The Wild Bunch -- which left out all of the other titles whose announcement I found so disheartening. Yet these headlines pop up breathlessly on the various movie websites, without any sort of critical filter.

Which is a whole other column: about how the media has, essentially, abdicated its responsibility to call "bulls**t" on bad ideas -- or at least point out how misguided they are. Instead -- in entertainment reporting as in political coverage -- all is simply headline fodder. Critical thinking? What's that?

Every day, however, it seems that yet another genuinely bad idea surfaces and is greeted with the kind of excitement once reserved for, well, genuinely good ideas.